The Right Gift

Thanksgiving is supposed to be about gratitude and Christmas about what?
Getting more stuff we don't really need, but sometimes selfishly want?

It's also the political season, which will outlast Christmas - along with
every other holiday between now and Halloween next - and that means
listening to claims by Democratic presidential candidates that the economy
is bad and getting worse.

Here's a suggestion for a Christmas present you can give yourself that will
be remembered long after whatever you get and give this Christmas is
forgotten. Depending on your age, go to your grandparents and ask how they
lived when they were young, or even middle-aged. Try visiting the house in
which they grew up. Ask them what kind of things they received at Christmas.
Have them tell you the amount of their average paycheck. Then ask if they
were content.

I am privileged to live on the same street where I spent the first seven
years of my life. My elementary school was a half block away from our
two-bedroom apartment, which also remains. The neighborhood was all white
then, now it houses mostly immigrants. I don't know what my parents paid in
rent during World War II, but I do know my mother had ration stamps, some of
which she pasted in a scrapbook she gave to me. I never heard her complain
about "doing without," though she frequently did.

When my Dad returned from the war, we moved to another Washington suburb.
His first house cost $20,000. He bought it on the GI Bill and thought he had
arrived on easy street. The house is still there. It would fit inside my
current home and yet people my age are crying about the stagnating economy.
They've got to be kidding.

When my father died, I went through his papers and discovered some old
income tax returns. The amount of money he made in his later years (and even
his middle years) would be considered poverty wages by today's standards. I
never heard him complain. He always provided for us and taught us to be
grateful for what we had and to live within our means.

I keep some of my early paychecks from NBC where I started in journalism as
a copy boy. The weekly salary is less than my withholding today. I'm not
bragging, just saying that we ought to remind ourselves of the gift we have
that is America, which offers opportunities to succeed more than any nation
on Earth.

Beginning with the Baby Boomers, we began to transition from being content
with what we have to a sense of being entitled to ever-expanding pieces of
the economic pie. We demanded more money, more things, more pleasure. Why
has the acquisition of "more" produced so much less - less contentment, less
happiness? When the income increases don't come fast enough to keep pace
with the want increases and pleasure is not constant, many complain and moan
about "hard times." Anyone who has not been through a Great Depression and a
world war has no reason to whine.

Most of our demands are a response to marketing. We are assaulted with
commercials and ads that assert our "need" for whatever it is they are
trying to sell us. When our income is insufficient to meet those newly
discovered wants, the spouse goes to work to help pay for them. The kids go
into day care, or its equivalent - ever earlier pre-kindergarten. When these
children display social malfunction, we find doctors to prescribe drugs to
soothe their legitimate anxiety.

With all of the gifts you've bought by now, maybe it's too late to accept
the state you're in and be content with it. But it isn't too soon to make a
New Year's resolution that next Christmas will be different. As the sales
figures pour in and the stock market reacts to whether this was a good or
bad economic year, ask yourself what your year has been like. Has more stuff
- or its pursuit - assuaged you? If not, maybe you were given the wrong
gift.

That's what Christmas is really about: the right gift. Receive THAT gift and
contentment will quickly follow.

Misc.

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